PBS - Frontline: Memory of the Camps

In 1945, at the end of World War II, victorious Allied forces marched into central and eastern Europe and made the gruesome discovery of the Nazi concentration camps. Accompanied by camera crews, British and American soldiers captured the full horror of the barbed wire fences, gas chambers, crematoriums, mass graves, and starving survivors in documentary footage that served as a visceral piece of on-the-spot reportage. Unfortunately, the film stock languished in the vaults of London's Imperial War Museum for nearly 40 years before it was finally rediscovered and reassembled by PBS, who restored Alfred Hitchcock's narrative script, added superbly straightforward narration by actor Trevor Howard, and finally gave the film its first real broadcast as a FRONTLINE episode in 1985. Unadorned by a musical score and rendered in stark black-and-white photography that does not flinch from showing every last harrowing detail, MEMORY OF THE CAMPS continues to stand as the definitive film testament of man's inhumanity to man.